Director's Weekly Reports

We received a second piece of good news this week - from NIST to whom we submitted a $1.5M proposal for Federal Stimulus funds to complete the ultra clean lab in Comer - we have reached the second round of the review process in this competition too. So there will be a lot of crossed fingers around here over the next few weeks...

We ran a Development event on Monday afternoon for a small group of folks from the affluent village of Alpine NJ - thanks to Robin Bell and Margie Turrin for sharing their enthusiasm about Antarctica and all things cold and icy in such an interesting and engaging way...

We made another step towards the final implementation of the Research Professor positions at an important meeting with representatives of the CU Controller and Research Compliance offices on Monday. Our plans for the transition years, during which folks move from 12 month positions to 9 month positions, are complex from an effort reporting perspective - but the startegy that we had worked out with ExCom was found to be without flaws. So one more hurdle has been crossed.

Columbia University, at the highest levels, is engaged in a 're-branding' initiative and is requiring that all Schools move away from their own logos and identity, and adopt a uniform 'look' in which Columbia University itself is clear and prominent. The new CU-approved Lamont identity can be found at, and downloaded from: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/campus-services/ldeo-logo So, from now on, this is what you should be using on your powerpoints or whatever....

A brief welcoming presentation to a group of representatives from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (hosted by Bob Chen), followed by an EI Climate Center Steering Committee meeting and a meeting of the Executive Committee of the EI Faculty pretty much consumed Monday. And first thing Tuesday I was off to DC for four days of Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and Ocean Leadership meetings. The report on these discussions will constitute the bulk of the report
this week, so if you are not interested in either, skip to the end! (Because the last paragraph is REALLY important).

The point to emphasize about OOI - is that it is happening! And it is happening on a scale that we in the ocean sciences business have never seen before. The cooperative agreement between NSF and Ocean Leadership for this program is over $750M (yes, three quarters of a billion dollars) over several years...

eff Sachs spent the day on the Lamont Campus on Monday, meeting for two hours with the LDEO ExCom in the morning and then visiting with the leadership of IRI, CIESIN and Tropical Agriculture through the afternoon. This presented a much-welcomed opportunity to engage Jeff in our research goals and resulted in some excellent discussions.

It was great to see Lamont alumnus John Hall on Tuesday and hear his intriguing stories of the development of a hovercraft for research in the ice covered Arctic Ocean. This was an all-too-rare-example of very high-risk innovation in approaches to data collection - a characteristic of our research world that has almost disappeared to zero (but thankfully not quite) since the demise of ONR funding for blue water ocean science...

I flew into Houston last Sunday night in order to enjoy the two hour drive across the Texas outback to the metropolis of College Station, where I spent Monday in discussions with Texas A&M leadership about the future of the Ocean Drilling Program. It is rare on a one-day visit to any university to be privileged to have separate meetings with the President, the Provost, the VP for Research and the Dean of Geosciences, but that is what happened last Monday. A&M's commitment to the future of ocean drilling cannot be questioned...

There was a great talk this afternoon - this years 'Science of Diversity' talk at the regular colloquium - Meg Urry, the Chair of the Physics department at Yale did a superb job of reviewing the issues that cause there to be so few women in research science. This was a welcome intellectual break from a marathon ExCom this morning and a DEES Faculty meeting (attended by Arts and Sciences VP Nick Dirks) this afternoon...

Last Saturday was the Annual Meeting of the New York Marine Sciences Consortium - Wade McGillis attended as our representative on the Board of Governors. This is a relatively new organization that was established to increase the visibility of the importance of marine science research at the NY state level. It is unfortunate that its formation coincided with the financial crisis so growth has been slower than we had hoped. But it is in its early days.

Lamont/Columbia is one of the founding members and we sit on the Executive committee, so I am hoping that we can play a meaningful role going forward. If you would like to play a larger role, chick out the web site - www.nymarinesciences.org - and in particular add your profile by clicking on the 'Directory' button on the Home page and downloading their form.

Our Marine Operations group is undergoing a routine "Business Systems Review" by NSF - a process that will take 6-9 months to complete, but that was begun this week with three days of meetings with NSF representatives. This is one more example of the ever-increasing oversight on management and expenditure of federal dollars that is being imposed from DC. We have to show that we have all the checks and balances in place to insure that we are doing a thorough and careful job of spending the tax-payers money according to federally-mandated policies. The final report should be completed in the late spring...

This week was not as quiet and uneventful as I expected it to be - lots of activities ramping up for the new academic year - not least of which is the arrival of a new cohort of students - a total of 54, I think - 15 PhD students, 38 Climate and Society and one Earth and Environmental Science Journalism. I met with them briefly on Wednesday - they filled every seat in the Comer Seminar room. Meeting with them was a great way to start the new year.

A couple of 'Save-the-dates' that are particularly worthy of mention...

I spent a few idyllic days up north in the Adirondacks at the beginning of the week - discovering the profound limitations of Verizon's published coverage charts and the remarkably tiny spatial scales upon which cell phone signal strengths vary dramatically - tens of meters in places!

But more importantly - our final proposal to the federal agency's stimulus-funded infrastructure programs was submitted just before the deadline on Monday. Of the three we have submitted over the last couple of months this was the largest - asking for an $8M renovation of the second floor of the New Core Lab...

We entertained Angel White from Oregon State on Tuesday and pretty much finalized our discussions about her plans to join our Biological Oceanography group as a Doherty Associate Scientist early next calendar year. We are very much looking forward to having her on board.

A lot of activity with the Marine Office this week as we complete the complex procedures associated with getting the clearances for Doug Toomey, Emilie Hooft and Will Wilcock's cruise to the Endeavor segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, -scheduled to sail from Astoria today. Unfortunately you will probably read about it in Nature (the complexities, that is)...

It has been a remarkably hectic week not only a flood of proposals headed for the NSF August 15th target date, but also a string of visitors, from CU Research Admin on Morningside, and a new prospective LDEO Advisory board member.

Langseth nears the end of a very long slow passage from Taiwan to Astoria Oregon ...

The first week after returning from vacation is always tough - especially when the weather is as great as it is today - a marked change from last week!

Finalizing the decision not to hold Open House this fall was one of the more discouraging moments of this first week back - but given the tough spot we are in financially, and given that the cost of Open House equates approximately to that of one year of post doc support, I fear there was no alternative. The article about this in the Journal News on Friday misquoted me with regards to my hopes of when we could hold the next one. The article said 2011 - I really hope we do not have to miss two years - I hope we can do it again next year in 2010...

The central subject of this week's report will be the essential synergy between cell phones and hair dryers. I do not generally use a hair dryer, but I always use a cell phone - most often in fact to access the Internet through Verizon's excellent broadband network...

The pressure resulting from the Federal Stimulus package proposal opportunities means that there is little sensation that summer has arrived, despite the gorgeous weather (which undoubtedly will come to an abrupt end as I am going sailing for a couple of weeks starting Saturday!). Thanks to the heroics of many - but especially Bonnie Bonkowski, Steve Chillrud and Pat O'Reilly we got an $8M proposal submitted to NIH for a new Exposure Assessment and Environmental Biogeochemistry facility - one of only three submissions from CU allowed by the rules of the competition. This is an excellent proposal - put together from scratch in less than six weeks...

We received excellent news at the beginning of the week - our letter of intent to an NIST Announcement of Opportunity to help complete the fund raising for the Comer Building was accepted and we were invited to submit a proposal. As with all the Stimulus Funding opportunities it has a very short fuse - an August 10th deadline - but once we get the NIH proposal for over $8M for a new Exposure Assessment and Environmental Biogeochemistry Laboratory Building out the door on Monday, then this will be our next target. The NIST program is on behalf of all the agencies within the Department of Commerce (DoC), so we will be playing the NOAA climate science card (because NOAA is part of DoC), and this should give us a strong case...

Geoff Abers and Goran Ekstrom co-chaired a significant workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday - planning an exciting (ARRA funded) combined onshore and offshore seismic experiment around Cascadia in the north west US. Not only was the attendance a veritable who's who in US seismology (along with three program managers and one section head from NSF) but also, most importantly, it represented real progress in attaining the long held goal - one that I certainly failed to achieve during my time at NSF - to get NSF Earth Sciences Division and the NSF Ocean Sciences Division working together cooperatively to tackle the many significant and relevant problems that cross the shore line...

No travel this week, which was a pleasant change. But a wonderful evening event on Monday at the Frick Mansion in Alpine NJ participating in a fund raising event for the local Alpine school and getting to meet many of the residents of this intriguing, tiny, exceptionally wealthy town. We made a number of good new contacts that hopefully will become friends to LDEO in the future.

We entertained Kyoshi Suyehiro on Wednesday, who stopped by for a few hours on his way from the IODP jackup rig off New Jersey (that is drilling the hole that Greg Mountain has been trying to get drilled for a century or two) to his IODP-MI Office in DC where he is now President...

The happiest news of the week is that the April issue of "Deep Sea Research" has been dedicated to Taro Takahashi. Taro, in his typically modest way, insists that "Since my ocean study was (and is) conducted entirely at Lamont with Lamont colleagues, I would like to share this honor and recognition with the entire Observatory."

There is a wonderful citation in the journal that states in part:

"Taro is an outstanding scientist, colleague, and mentor, with a graciousness and humility that has been an inspiration to us all throughout his entire career"

Congratulations Taro for this thoroughly appropriate and well-deserved recognition.

We received the great news on Monday that we have been given the one slot available to CU for submission of a proposal to NSF's Buildings and Infrastructure RFP issued as part of the Stimulus funding program (formally known as the American Reinvestment and recovery Act (ARRA)...